In retail, hospital, long-term-care and mail order medicament dispensing, a large number of different prescription orders must be fulfilled. The prescription orders may include one or more prescription for single-dose medications or medicaments, such as tablets. Fulfillment as used herein refers to the process of handling and executing customer orders. The term “tablets” and “medicaments” as used herein should be understood as being generic to tablets, capsules, caplets and any other solid-dose medication types including prescription and non-prescription medications, products and the like.
Automatic vial filling machines, automatic pouch packaging machines and other types of medicament filling machines under control of a data processing platform are used in pharmacy locations to store bulk medicaments in removable storage modules frequently referred to as “cassettes.” Periodically, it in necessary to replenish bulk medicaments in the cassettes or return such medicaments to stock in the case of unclaimed medicaments. In order to replenish cassettes or return medicaments to stock, the pharmacy user typically must remove a cassette from a mount and load medicaments into the cassette. With existing machines using cassettes, there is no control or supervision over operation of cassettes that are removed from the machine for loading, or for any other reason. As a result, there is a chance, no matter how small, that incorrect medicaments could be loaded into a cassette.
For example, in a return-to-stock scenario, it may be necessary to return unclaimed medicaments from a pharmacy will-call holding area back to a cassette. As is known, medicaments frequently look alike, yet can have different active ingredients and strengths. Given the look-a-like nature of medicaments, a pharmacy user could inadvertently load a cassette with a medicament that has the same physical appearance as the medicament in the cassette, yet is different in type or strength.
In a replenishment scenario there is also a risk that the wrong medicament could be loaded into a cassette, if the cassette could be simply replenished without any further level of control. For example, a user might replenish a cassette without careful verification because of a perceived need to quickly fill a prescription order. A further example could include a busy pharmacy user who might properly replenish a cassette, yet put the cassette aside to perform other tasks, possibly permitting contamination of the medicaments in the cassette by some agent or other contaminate. It is also possible that the cassette could be accessed by an unauthorized user when set aside. No matter how small the opportunity, errors could occur if the cassette replenishment process is not completed immediately and a partially filled cassette is allowed to sit idle in a busy pharmacy.
Further, with any restocking or replenishment process performed by a human, there is small risk of error. Involvement of and supervision by senior pharmacy personnel in the restocking or replenishing procedure may be useful to reduce such risk of error.
It would be an improvement in the art to provide a system and method which would improve the restocking and replenishment process used in pharmacies including providing for a supervised loading process including restocking and replenishment. Such an improved loading process would provide an increased likelihood that the cassette is restocked or replenished with bulk medicaments in the proper manner and would contribute to the improvement and quality of patient care.